[SIC] Friday (Sommery)

7.24.26. A second interstitial, portending next week's return to regularly scheduled programming. Really, this time.

Hi all. Getting back into the swing of things hasn’t been easy. That is not meant as an excuse, just a statement of fact. Shaking off the cobwebs after four weeks has been more complicated than I thought. Hence, the Summer Friday-style late send this week but also the shaggy nature of this particular dispatch. Maybe you’ll find it charming, who knows. I think a lot of people last week were just excited to have me back in their inboxes. We’ll see if that enthusiasm holds.

In any case, there’ll be no more excuses: starting next week, we’re back to a weekly cadence for paid subscribers. There will be paid programming Sunday, Tuesday, and Friday, and the big free email will come on Thursdays, as it always used to, in a style probably not dissimilar to this. For paid folks, it’ll be exclusive interviews, some special once-a-week aggregation, as well as probably some thinkier pieces or guest essays. I’m really interested in exploring the contributor model, as many of my counterparts have. If you’ve got ideas, send them.

I’m also still going to be playing around with format and length, as well as subject headings, and probably introducing some kind of “You really ought to read this” type section at the top. That’s been a common request.

I’m also going to try to do more to point you to events and happenings that I think are interesting. A prototypical example here this week:

• the invites to the Bompus and Parr event in London

• the San Francisco Art Book Fair

• 1990s MTV’s “BUZZ” in LA

• Horse Meat Disco at Knockdown Center, which I sadly will not be able to be at, but which has spawned my favorite ever back-to-mine mix, which soundtracked this edition

Horse Meat Labor Day Knockdown. Say hi to mother for me.

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I’ll also try to start out with a little friend section every time, since there are so many people that are doing interesting stuff in and around the [SIC"} universe.

Take for instance Philosophy Club: Bernard Mandeville, [SIC] Talks alum Avery Trufelman’s new pod series with menswear mysterioso Derek Guy bring more erudition than it deserves to clothing (and still comes across charming.

Also new in the pod space Americana Slurry is a new(ish) format for Tasteland, hosts Daisy Alioto and Francis Zierer speak to three expert guests about the resurgence of American prep, including fellow alum Sean Monahan

Sean’s newest the shift to vibes “things right now” present are a useful corollary.

Bonus paneling: A snippet of me interviewing Daisy at the Future Commerce Summit last year

Another thing that feels like it’s right up Sean’s alley: Terence McKenna presciently construed our zeitgeist as “so weird that people are going to have to talk about how weird it is.” Elan Alexander’s looksMAXXING (2026) investigates it straight from the eye of the storm.

Speaking the eye of the storm, alum Ryan McGuiness is embarking on a new studio art project space where he’s inviting collaborators to use his studio as a full-time office space (rental, to be clear). As he writes:

This is not office space. It is a working artist’s studio

that shares its floor with a small community of

creative tenants and opens its exhibition and gather-

ing spaces to teams who want to think somewhere

that doesn’t look like a conference room.

Ryan’s calling it, HAHA Studios, it’s in Central Tribeca and if you want to see the deck, give Ryan a shout at studio@ryanmcginness.com

There’s an IP generation corollary in Kevin Kelly’s classic essay “Better Than Free: When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.” Freshly relevant in examings how value migrates to things that can’t be copied: immediacy, personalization, authenticity, findability, embodiment, patronage, interpretation, and accessibility.

Notable then that Brian Morrissey’s media confab, the TRB Audience Summit on Sept 17th, will be invite only.

Couple more: word on the street is that “The Cutting Room Floor is currently in the midst of a significant hiring period”. One gig of interest: Editorial Manager.

And kind of related to that: we got an Epicly Later’d about Epicly Later’d.

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Last night was the opening reception of The Power of Honey: Food, Finance & The Golden Age of Fraud, a new interactive exhibition at the Bank of England Museum. This was the invite I got in advance from Sam Bompas but since it’s got the story of the event, I’m including it here:

Also happening right now in Barcelona (24th) is the local launch of Culture Slop, from my HIP REPLACEMENT Co-host Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick.

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HIP REPLACEMENT EP.66: Jenny Rothenberg.

The Smooth Media co-founder joins to chat the business of creators, the workification of life, and how young leaders hire.

There’s a corollary in the latest Brenda’s Business with Heidi Klum. Girlbossy.

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Now, to stuff you can actually go to:

• How to Turn Architecture’s Devolution Around: Architecture Against Architecture: A Manifesto is Reinier de Graaf’s latest book and the latest subject of New York Architecture + Design Book Club, which Untapped runs with the Brooklyn cultural organization Head Hi. Taking place July 25, the program will feature de Graaf in conversation with Lauren and Craig Sinclair of Sinclair Collective. RSVP to secure your spot.

• Ballew × Bungee Space & Friends Summer Festival 49 Grand St in Williamsburg until 26th July. I think Bungee is one of the most interesting spaces in New York. It’s always putting out things like “The Post is the Art: Richard Prince 1234 / instagram recordings, vol. 7”

• The San Francisco Art Book Fair is also on right now and runs through the weekend. Flyer here:

other stuff I’m planning to see a little further afield:

• Ticket’s went on sale for Roy Lichtenstein : LIke New comes to the Whitney October 11 in the artist’s first major survey in more than thirty years. Basic as they might seem, I’m still a sucker for Benday dots.

• When I’m grabbing Marcella from Hudson in two weeks I’m going to swing by The Campus’s 3rd Annual Exhibition at the former Ockawamick School in Hudson is running through November 1, 2026 and includes eight UK galleries alongside artists from the six founding galleries.

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Closer to home, Every good night you’ve ever had at the club owes a debt to New York City. Webster Hall, built in 1886, is widely considered the first ever modern nightclub.

Hong Kong Corollary: Mapping the International Internet Gothic. Patrick Koh reporting from a Nu China club night: “Goth” is shedding old definitions, reshaping across borders into an emerging “alt” internet aesthetic.

Meanwhile, across the Korea Strait: The trinket takeover: unpicking the microtrends of consumer culture in Seoul

More regional fascination: Are LLMs obsessed with Japan?

While Gig workers now account for 44% of China’s total workforce.

Not surprisingly, then: A 56-year-old food delivery driver won China’s top literary prize. for his 2024 collection Low Flight, some of which he scribbled on scraps of paper between deliveries. “If there’s a fifth season in the human world / It must be spring for deliverymen,” Wang writes in the titular poem.

Speaking of all seasons and then some; What Permaculture Teaches Us About Psychedelics

Also increasingly permanent: Psychedelic drugs are going mainstream. Commercial success is looking less theoretical for treatments based on mushrooms and LSD

Case in point: The Church of Psilomethoxin — has claimed for years it can produce a novel psychedelic drug by feeding toad-derived 5-MeO-DMT to psilocybin mushroom substrate.

Also?! Has the New Cocaine Finally Arrived? Clubgoers are using 3-MMC to dance all night, then taking more to lock in at the office.

Relatedly: How to Solve the Cocaine Problem. Just make it here!

THIS IS BUZZ: ANALOG + ECSTASY Is FREE AND OPEN TO ALL 12-10p JULY 25TH at BEYOND THE STREETS GALLERY LA

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Another on the topic of repositioning: Reggie James posits A NEW NARRATIVE FRAMEWORK FOR DATA CENTERS with typical consideration and aplomb.

More new narratives. The Irresistible Rise of Massimiliano Gioni: Why the New Museum Is Betting on an Insider

First order of business ? Just a few months after the reopening of the New Museum’s expanded building, a water leak shut down the Manhattan institution for a full weekend.

A few blocks north, the Latest East Village preservation fight: This pull-up bar in Tompkins Square Park

apropos of that Pete Hegseth, You Call That a Pull-Up? Military fitness experts say the secretary of defense fails on form.

Sinister resembling: Defense tech’s aesthetic turn is peak 2026.

Also failing up: Shane Gillis broke the Guinness World Record for most tickets sold for a solo comedy show in Philadelphia last week.

Just me? Or is Jack Dorsey’s Buzz, a group chat platform for teams and their AI agents, strangely redolent of NFTs, in that every member, human or AI, gets a cryptographic identity built on the Nostr protocol, and each agent carries a second signature tying it back to the human who owns it.

Meantime, claiming “Against Claudefishing”, Substack is partnering with Pangram to launch an AI-detection tool that will let readers scan posts and replies to estimate how much of the text was written by the actual author versus with AI.

Unsurprisingly, Roblox is pushing out AI tools to actually make it so that anyone could make their own game:

Sooo…. A university class builds its own internet

Unrelated, somehow: Welcome to Lower Duck Pond, the nicest town on the internet

And also There is now a video game for Canal Street’s most infamous bar, Clandestino.

Seafood corollary: thinking about the immortality of the crab

More hermits: How to end rough sleeping in London. This is v. thought provoking despite my jokey intro.

Back to chefs: Food / hospitality media startup Caper is launching a “Chef in Residence” program with Ryan Bartlow of Ernesto’s and Bartolo as its inaugural participant.

Are Electric Cars Making Us Healthier? Beijing has become a proving ground for how widespread EV adoption can rapidly turn the smoggy skies of a city a dazzling blue.

And to think we were JUST talking about the immortality of crabs…. Defending Against Rising Sea Levels.

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I am way behind the pace this year.

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20 Brilliant books you can read in a day. Among them I’ve only read Train Dreams and Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, so I’m feeling the FOMO. Would add the recently revisited Mice and Men and Great Gatsby as perennials. Eurotrash, A Novel, too.

More things to read: Summer reading recs from former Vanity Fair EIC Radhika Jones courtesy of Yolanda Edwards’s YOLO Journal.

Also hospitality-coded: Inside the Sauna Salon, Pleasure-Seeking’s wet n’ wild reading

And Happier, Stupider Times a new coffee table tome timed to dimensionalize the biopic “Tony” and dedicated to “the place and time that shaped Anthony Bourdain’s formative years: the cooks, artists, and partiers who defined the anything-goes lifestyle of summers in 1970s Provincetown.”

How A24 Is Modernizing Movie Marketing. Continuing on with last week’s theme, I got more presents from A24 this week, including “Trickers Cabin,” the oral and visual history of Online Ceramics, which will either end up being a strange curiosity or a grail-type book for art students in 2050.

Not to be outdone in that case Disney announced that it’s launching a new streetwear-inspired clothing label called “.YNSD.” Bobby, I know you’re reading. Come on the pod.

More movie modernized marketing: Cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun) is a director now, via his Shinola “Thriller About Time and Anxiety”

Since we’re talking time and anxiety : How to Save Marriage which makes the argument that marriage can work if we acquiesce to the notion that

“Our ideas about traditional marriage are holding many people back from getting and staying married; also, our ideas about traditional marriage are incorrect; also, “there is no such thing as the traditional marriage.”

So, like, Want to Bet on My Wedding? As prediction markets and prop betting gain popularity, more couples are integrating them into their celebrations.

On the topic of determinative outcomes: Tangent is Soft Machine’s associative word game, apparently informed by a session I took part in. Interesting to see how these small language models. Violet? Beauregard.

Weirdly according to the contact sheet on the Soft Machine email, one of the participants was Ferris Bueller, which gave coincidental meaning to this Atlantic piece The 40-Year-Old Man-Child about how Ferris Bueller’s Day Off “has avoided a midlife crisis for good reason: It’s a timeless portrait of popularity and truthiness.”

Back to marriages for a second: My wife sent me the UTA Culture Canon, which they call “a brand leader’s guide to culture, people, and what matters this year.”

For those who’re interested: shades of that also in Dot Dot Dot’s 51 Sources the Culturally Fluent Already Know.

Back in Hollywood: The 100 most powerful directors in Hollywood.

Corollary: Podcast producer Rachel Braun and former UTA CEO Jeremy Zimmer are hosting 877 UNMPLYD, a live show for people looking for a job.

Also [audio] corollary: One startup’s quest to change streaming for deaf people

And since we’re talking myth makers: In Defense of Brand Myth. Protecting heritage in the age of slop

Apropos of that: Luxury’s most profitable client is the one it treats worst. The most valuable customers are the wealthiest, yet operating systems remain designed for the aspirational buyer.

One way to do anti-slop? Speculative Archeology: Pixels and Permanence. Artist and designer Kleinian on printing screenshots onto stone, wiring rocks for sound, and what future generations might dig up from our digital age.

And since we’re making things with our hands: Mechanical Royalties May Be Waiting For You - Nick Catchdubs out here doing the lord’s work.

Also DJ-coded, as it were: The Met stitched 193 national anthems into one “meta-anthem.”

More music meta: Social Media is the New Rock & Roll, per a typically diffident, recalcitrant Lefsetz.

Ergo: The Unicode Consortium revealed nine new emoji for Unicode 18.

Being a daughter is complicated. Just ask Gracie Abrams, Lorde, Taylor Swift, and Hayley Williams

Less complicated: now we got the World’s first painless tattoo

Sabri Sundos Faces Catastrophe With Flowers “It’s the one thing in the world that is just there to make things beautiful” per our dude (and OG Kinfolk alum IKYKY)

Also IYKYK somehow? The Comedians Who Helped Define Generation X In the early ’90s, the Kids in the Hall transgressed boundaries of propriety, gender, sexuality, even species as an alternative to binary thinking.

Also not bound by binaries: Giant Denim Shorts Have Taken over NYC

Meantime, Gen Z Changed Its Mind About Crew Sock

Also changing: Who says Gen Z doesn’t drink?

And thus for the hungover mornings: Gen Z’s ‘Jolene’ Is Here. Ella Langley’s country music offers an appealing commodity for this moment: moderation.

Homestretch now.

Not moderating: Bump, Set, Boom: Why Girls Volleyball is Suddenly Everywhere Girls volleyball has become the second-most-popular high school team sport for girls in the US

Athletics corollary: Welcome to ‘Trackflation’ Four-minute miles are almost routine.the youth track boom that’s turning kids and teens into speed machines.

• Case in point: The Most Surprising Thing [David Epstein] Had Ever Seen in Sports; Q&A with US national champ at 800 meters and high school junior Cooper Lutkenhaus

• While Josh Kerr broke the men’s mile record, running it in 3:42.66. The previous record, of 3:43.13, was set 27 years ago.

• Chasing a dream: Hoping for a personal-best marathon finish, a Times reporter headed to Kenya’s Great Rift Valley to learn from some of the world’s best runners.

And so naturally. Running publisher Like The Wind Turns Its Magazine into an Event. The Power of Live.

Ok enough. See you next week.

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